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Authors: William Shakespeare
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for the coming of her lord, we decline to accept her as other than a being out of Arthurian legend. 18
Despite performing his role in Italian in an otherwise English production, the actor Tommaso Salvini’s red-bearded Macbeth combined, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, “pride and the sense of animal well-being” with “moral smallness.” His appearance in the final act suggested how “the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the air of carnage and supped full of horrors.” 19 Sarah Bernhardt, meanwhile, played Lady Macbeth in a French prose translation turning the play into “a dull and somewhat vulgar melodrama” 20 in which Bernhardt’s histrionic performance was described in the London
Times
as “inadequate and unsatisfactory.” 21
The scholarly Johnston Forbes-Robertson, an acclaimed Hamlet, and sophisticated Mrs. Patrick Campbell were miscast as the Macbeths in the Lyceum’s 1898 production. Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s spectacular production with Violet Vanbrugh as Lady Macbeth was more successful but included fifteen scene changes and lasted over four hours.
Blackwood
’s
Edinburgh Magazine
complained that Beerbohm Tree “has sought to achieve a pictorial, not a dramatic effect.” 22 Meanwhile, the reaction against such overblown productions, which started in Germany, was taken up by William Poel, who founded the Elizabethan Stage Society and staged his plays as far as possible as they had been in Shakespeare’s time—on simple thrust stages with minimal scenery and props.
These contrasting production styles continued to compete until Barry Jackson’s 1928 Birmingham Repertory Theatre production, directed by H. J. Ayliff, set the play in the period of the First World War:
The battle scenes with which it opened and closed were brought up to date with exploding shells and rattling machine guns. Macbeth was dressed in khaki uniform with riding-breeches, high, polished boots, and a chest covered in medal ribbons. Lady Macbeth appeared in a short, sleeveless cocktail dress, and Lady Macduff and her son were murdered over a cup of afternoon tea by killers who entered through a casement window. 23
2. Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, reading the letter from her husband (Lyceum Theatre, London, 1888).
Critics complained that the poetry of the play was lost in the clipped modern delivery, although Laurence Olivier won praise for his performance as Malcolm. For all its faults, the production led the way “to a new understanding of
Macbeth
as a play about alienation in an amoral modern world, whose hero, Kafka-like, finds himself isolated by his visions from those around him, and who discovers that hell is not a place elsewhere but the nightmare within.” 24 As critic Michael Mullin goes on to argue, “Jackson’s failed experiment pointed the way and made possible a series of theatrical experiments leading from Komisarjevsky to Guthrie, and finally culminating in Glen Byam Shaw’s tour de force at Stratford-upon-Avon in which Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh gave what theater historians consider a definitive Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.” 25
John Gielgud was involved in three productions between 1930 and 1952. The first at the Old Vic was directed by Harcourt Williams. Gielgud’s romantic Macbeth was admired for its intellectual quality and the quality of the verse-speaking. The critic James Agate judged Martita Hunt’s Lady Macbeth, playing opposite Gielgud, to be “too likeable.” 26 Gielgud went on to direct the play himself in 1942 at the Piccadilly Theatre, in a performance that, though not to all tastes, the critic Audrey Williamson considered
Poetically … the crowning achievement of our time; his ‘air-borne dagger’ seared the eyeballs, and the imaginative impulse was never wholly lost until it dwindled
Despite performing his role in Italian in an otherwise English production, the actor Tommaso Salvini’s red-bearded Macbeth combined, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, “pride and the sense of animal well-being” with “moral smallness.” His appearance in the final act suggested how “the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the air of carnage and supped full of horrors.” 19 Sarah Bernhardt, meanwhile, played Lady Macbeth in a French prose translation turning the play into “a dull and somewhat vulgar melodrama” 20 in which Bernhardt’s histrionic performance was described in the London
Times
as “inadequate and unsatisfactory.” 21
The scholarly Johnston Forbes-Robertson, an acclaimed Hamlet, and sophisticated Mrs. Patrick Campbell were miscast as the Macbeths in the Lyceum’s 1898 production. Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s spectacular production with Violet Vanbrugh as Lady Macbeth was more successful but included fifteen scene changes and lasted over four hours.
Blackwood
’s
Edinburgh Magazine
complained that Beerbohm Tree “has sought to achieve a pictorial, not a dramatic effect.” 22 Meanwhile, the reaction against such overblown productions, which started in Germany, was taken up by William Poel, who founded the Elizabethan Stage Society and staged his plays as far as possible as they had been in Shakespeare’s time—on simple thrust stages with minimal scenery and props.
These contrasting production styles continued to compete until Barry Jackson’s 1928 Birmingham Repertory Theatre production, directed by H. J. Ayliff, set the play in the period of the First World War:
The battle scenes with which it opened and closed were brought up to date with exploding shells and rattling machine guns. Macbeth was dressed in khaki uniform with riding-breeches, high, polished boots, and a chest covered in medal ribbons. Lady Macbeth appeared in a short, sleeveless cocktail dress, and Lady Macduff and her son were murdered over a cup of afternoon tea by killers who entered through a casement window. 23
2. Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, reading the letter from her husband (Lyceum Theatre, London, 1888).
Critics complained that the poetry of the play was lost in the clipped modern delivery, although Laurence Olivier won praise for his performance as Malcolm. For all its faults, the production led the way “to a new understanding of
Macbeth
as a play about alienation in an amoral modern world, whose hero, Kafka-like, finds himself isolated by his visions from those around him, and who discovers that hell is not a place elsewhere but the nightmare within.” 24 As critic Michael Mullin goes on to argue, “Jackson’s failed experiment pointed the way and made possible a series of theatrical experiments leading from Komisarjevsky to Guthrie, and finally culminating in Glen Byam Shaw’s tour de force at Stratford-upon-Avon in which Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh gave what theater historians consider a definitive Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.” 25
John Gielgud was involved in three productions between 1930 and 1952. The first at the Old Vic was directed by Harcourt Williams. Gielgud’s romantic Macbeth was admired for its intellectual quality and the quality of the verse-speaking. The critic James Agate judged Martita Hunt’s Lady Macbeth, playing opposite Gielgud, to be “too likeable.” 26 Gielgud went on to direct the play himself in 1942 at the Piccadilly Theatre, in a performance that, though not to all tastes, the critic Audrey Williamson considered
Poetically … the crowning achievement of our time; his ‘air-borne dagger’ seared the eyeballs, and the imaginative impulse was never wholly lost until it dwindled
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